The Center for HIV Identification, Prevention, and Treatment Services (CHIPTS) leverages world class science to combat HIV globally, in partnership with communities, families, and individuals impacted by the pandemic. Strategies for integrating, promoting, and diffusing HIV detection, prevention, and care are our primary mission. Investigators from UCLA, Friends Research Institute (Friends), LA County, and research and community partners globally collaborate to achieve CHIPTS'mission. CHIPTS creates opportunities for scientific leadership, expertise, and infrastructure to be leveraged to create, understand, and evaluate: 1) structural &community level interventions;2) models of adaptation &adoption of efficacious interventions;3) strategies to reduce disparities for scientists, nations, communities, &individuals;and 4) research agendas that integrate behavioral, biomedical, &technological intervention strategies. The CHIPTS community promotes cutting edge science;networks and builds capacity of scientists, advocates, policy makers, and consumers. Over the next five years, HIV research must capitalize and leverage the revolutionary changes that have occurred: setting the National AIDS Strategy;the global economic recession, which mandates increasingly more cost-effective interventions, especially with a declining USD;technological breakthroughs and integration of mobile phones, point-of-care diagnostics, embedded sensing, the web, and social networking;and the success of circumcision, microbicides, one-minute HIV tests, and oral post- and pre-exposure prophylaxis. To quickly mobilize to these shifts, infrastructure resources and senior expertise is organized to build diverse interdisciplinary teams that can produce new science, scientists, and diffuse the results. CHIPTS'agenda is implemented through six cores, each of which implements scientific, networking, and capacity building activities: Administrative, Development, Methods, Policy, Combination Prevention, and Global Capacity Building. The quality and quantity of the scientific progress is evaluated by a Continuous Quality Improvement Model.

Public Health Relevance

Los Angeles has the second highest number of AIDS cases nationally and is one of the most ethnically diverse epidemics, especially among Men-who-have-Sex-with-Men (MSM). CHIPTS partners on designing and implementing a scientific agenda, networking, and building capacity of the scientists, community and government partner agencies, consumers and policy makers. Concurrently, CHIPTS builds networks in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and South America of scientific collaborations for the epidemic.